“The Vicar’s talk was not always inspiriting: he had escaped being a Pharisee, but he had not escaped that low estimate of possibilities which we rather hastily arrive at as an inference from our own failure.”

“It is as if a person were a prisoner, and he had not only the intention to escape, which would perhaps be attainable, but also, and indeed simultaneously, the intention to rebuild the prison as a pleasure dome for himself. But if he escapes, he cannot rebuild, and if he rebuilds, he cannot escape.”

“He had escaped the abhorrent taint! He was truly completely alone! He was the only human being in the world!”

“As he had once said to someone in England, though he did not care to remember whom, he had liked the sight of the sea because it represented his escape from England. And he had escaped.But she had said that perhaps it was from himself he wished to escape and that it could not be done. For wherever he went, he must inevitably take himself along too.”

“...we really have no right to reproach God for having created the world. For Him it was the only possible way of escaping from the accursed void in which He found himself.”

“The novels were an escape from reality in the sense that we could marvel at their beauty and perfection. Curiously, the novels we escaped into led us finally to question and prod our own realities, about which we felt so helplessly speechless.”